[tptacek]

One of the biggest beefs I have with Europeans who take issue at NSA spying on the EU is the misconception they have that their own spy agencies aren't doing the same thing to everyone else: us, Russia, China, and other states in the EU.

More annoying about this argument though is the fact that the leaders of the most powerful EU states, regardless of what they may say to their own citizens, demonstrably benefit from and invite NSA spying. The German NBD, for instance, spied on Austria in collaboration with the NSA --- got caught doing so just last year. It's easy for EU SIGINT agencies to get away with this stuff, because they can launder the unpopular spying they want to do through NSA in private while "blaming" them in public.

If we want to have a world without spying, we should be honest about it. More honest than the conversation is today.

But we should also be careful what we wish for. The prevailing sentiment on HN is that NSA is more or less spying on behalf of Disney's copyright enforcement corps and the Moral Majority. But a lot of the reason we conduct foreign surveillance is to avoid large scale armed conflict. To allow us to head conflict off surgically, and to prevent intractable problems (for instance: unchecked proliferation of nuclear arms to countries that we'd have to invade to keep them from deploying).

I have real, bigly problems with NSA and think it needs drastic reform and completely restructured oversight. But I'm not in the (very large) faction that believes surveillance to be intrinsically evil. I personally feel fortunate to have made it out of the 1970s without disintegrating in a nuclear barrage. That threat is not gone; it is far more realistic than evil AI.

[jacquesm]

> But I'm not in the (very large) faction that believes surveillance to be intrinsically evil.

I don't think anybody on HN had that impression.

> I personally feel fortunate to have made it out of the 1970s without disintegrating in a nuclear barrage. That threat is not gone; it is far more realistic than evil AI.

So, essentially you're scared and that's why you are ok with surveillance. What I don't get is why you feel that all this surveillance is helping to keep you safe from nuclear barrage?

Personally I'm against mass surveillance of any kind, it is against our collective human rights (which does not stop at the border of the US or any other country), also I'm by extension against any kind of surveillance of the private individuals of any other country by intelligence operatives of my country.

Finally, 'Europeans' and 'Americans' are not entities that you can compare directly, Europeans are typically the citizens of some country and those countries have very different capabilities when it comes to surveillance and usually a very different role on the world stage. You can't compare the intelligence services of say Greece, Germany, Finland, the UK and Slovenia with respect to their capability and you really can't compare their role in Europe as an entity and in the world at large. States are not countries, the USA is a continent sized country with an extremely large federal budget when it comes to things like mass surveillance, military (aka 'defense', but it hasn't been used for that purpose in ages) and so on.

Finally, the reason that you'll find a lot of Europeans taking issue with any kind of spying on allies (also by their own intelligence services, which are most likely just as unhinged as the US ones) is that it isn't all that long ago that there was a large chunk of what is now the EU under the boot of an army of occupation, and that this was kept that way to a large extent by mass surveillance of the citizenry.

I sincerely hope you'll never be given a reason to regret your stance on being 'ok' with mass surveillance, but if you do end up regretting it don't be surprised by any lack of sympathy from my end, of all the people that I know that support this stance you are probably the only one where I will never understand why your position is the way it is.

[tptacek]

You've moved the goalposts, perhaps without realizing it. I'm OK with signals intelligence. I'm not OK with "mass surveillance" in the sense that you probably mean it --- a giant data warehouse in Utah storing and indexing everybody's email.

The comment to which I replied talked about tapping Angela Merkel's phones. If monitoring Werner Faymann's phone calls prevents a war, I'm fine with that --- as, apparently, is Angela Merkel.

Meanwhile, for those of us concerned about dragnet surveillance, the answer is to replace the janky 80s protocols we use to send and receive electronic communications with modern encrypted alternatives.

[jacquesm]

> I'm OK with signals intelligence. I'm not OK with "mass surveillance" in the sense that you probably mean it --- a giant data warehouse in Utah storing and indexing everybody's email.

They are to all intents and purposes equivalent, it is pointless to be 'for' signals intelligence but 'against' a giant datawarehouse in Utah storing and indexing everybody's email the one results in the other.

Besides email being only a very small part of the picture 'metadata' in the form of who-calls-who, when and how frequently is gold and there is no amount of encryption that will protect you from that data being captured and stored.

In many cases the difference between dragnet surveillance and signals intelligence is as small as whether or not someone (not something) has looked at the data stored.

And that giant data warehouse with all that email exists, it's just that there are three of them right now, one run by Google, one run by Microsoft and another by Yahoo regardless of what intelligence agencies are trying to accomplish in less direct ways. Other email servers are probably so lightly protected in comparison to those you may as well consider them compromised.

Finally, I can think of several simple ways in which even encryption isn't going to make much difference in collecting that data regardless of what is happening on the wire, and I'm sure you can too.

On the whole, the trend seems to be to store more data for longer times on an increasingly larger slice of the world population, some call that 'signals intelligence' when it suits them, others call it dragnet surveillance because that is what it is.

We're talking about: email, web surfing behavior, mobile text messages, location information and so on.

Whether Merkel is ok with having someone else's phone tapped while probably disagreeing with whether or not her own phone is tapped I'm against phone taps without warrants by the country where people reside, foreign entities should simply respect the law of the land and go through the proper channels. That way we don't have to deal with another 'Belgacom' (oh, sorry, Proximus).

It doesn't matter whether you call it signals intelligence or mass surveillance, the key is that it is warrantless surveillance, and that it is usually not your own country doing it.

> Meanwhile, for those of us concerned about dragnet surveillance, the answer is to replace the janky 80s protocols we use to send and receive electronic communications with modern encrypted alternatives.

That's going to make a relatively small impact, it will simply raise the bar for the various agencies to attack the network infrastructure and servers of the more interesting choke points as well as the originating endpoints (consumer computers) a little harder. The only thing that will really stop that is to make it illegal in some treaty. (Not that that will every happen, but it would be a nice change.)

I'm not sure why you believe monitoring Werner Faymann's phone would prevent a war or why it prevented one. Wikipedia has him currently working at the United Nations, what are you getting at here?.

[tptacek]

Respectfully, this is like 7 paragraphs of stuff we already know we don't disagree about, followed by the incoherent position that foreign spying is only acceptable when the citizenry of the foreign target agrees with it.

You can have an intellectually coherent position against foreign spying entirely. I'll point out the downsides of that position, but I won't tell you your argument is invalid.

But don't pretend. Either be against spying, own the potential downsides, and/or argue that those downsides don't matter, or accept that spying is coercive --- coercion is built into the concept, which is why we have the special word "spying".

BTW: Merkel authorized and the German NBD participated in SIGINT surveillance of Austria, is why I pulled that particular name out of my hat. Austria is interesting exactly because nobody would expect that particular spying target inside of Europe.

[jacquesm]

> followed by the incoherent position that foreign spying is only acceptable when the citizenry of the foreign target agrees with it.

Foreign spying on citizens of another country is not ok, period.

Domestic wiretaps/monitoring and so on are acceptable if and only if a judge signs off on it.

Governments spying on each other is acceptable as long as it does not devolve into spying on the rest of the citizens of that country wholesale.

In other words: ordinary citizens should be left alone, if you decide to join the government you're raising the stakes and you should be aware that you will become a 'person of interest' for many other parties.

I hope this clear up my position in a way that there is no room for mis-interpretation.

I'm sure EU governments spy on each other and I'm also sure that EU government officials are aware of this particular fact if only because they themselves are also engaging in it, so nothing of value was communicated with that particular example.

[tptacek]

I can't even tell where we disagree anymore. I think we're mostly just haggling over terminology at this point. So I'ma peace out of this now.

[harry8]

Do you think if any european ally of the US was caught out spying on Barack O.'s phone that the head of that agency would keep their job?

What about if they were caught out because they can't control contractors?

Who has been fired at the NSA after a series of total WTFs? Regardless if you think they do god's work or are in league with the devil, incompetence giving america a black eye ought to be something that has consequences. Apparently it doesn't.

[saiya-jin]

Ptacek... sounds Czech more than any other slavic language (means small bird). If you went through 40 years of communist oppression like Czech people went through, you would have a VERY different stance on these topics

[tptacek]

I'm Slovak and Irish. Which is another way of saying I'm from Chicago.

[smokeyj]

> The prevailing sentiment on HN is that NSA is more or less spying on behalf of Disney's copyright enforcement corps and the Moral Majority.

I'd leave out the moral part. It's too easy to spy on foreign execs, act on insider knowledge and fund political agendas. That's what I would do which is why I'm sure it happens. Accountability determines how rational people act. When we give total secrecy and no accountability to a portion of the population they tend to act.. a certain way.

> But I'm not in the (very large) faction that believes surveillance to be intrinsically evil

No one here would ever accuse you of such. But the phrasing lacks specificity. This isn't surveillance by the 7-11 Inc. where daily slurpies are purchased but rather surveillance by a multi trillion-dollar agency with a mandate outside of the public's knowledge or approval. There isn't anything a bit.. spooky about that?

[jonathanstrange]

>One of the biggest beefs I have with Europeans who take issue at NSA spying on the EU is the misconception they have that their own spy agencies aren't doing the same thing to everyone else: us, Russia, China, and other states in the EU.

I've never heard of a fellow European claiming this, but I also think that discussions of such issues should be based on evidence rather than speculation and general paranoia.

NSA and GHCQ were unlucky, because such evidence emerged. So they can rightly be criticized on the basis of published evidence about their spy programs.

Speculating about what intelligence agencies do without any evidence and knowledge at all, on the other hand, is quite pointless.

[nickpsecurity]

"One of the biggest beefs I have with Europeans who take issue at NSA spying on the EU is the misconception they have that their own spy agencies aren't doing the same thing to everyone else: us, Russia, China, and other states in the EU."

Same thing I kept telling them on Schneier's blog, etc. They sure aren't building those spy buildings as art projects. The worst part is that info on whose involved in spying agreements, even whose in "no-spy" agreements, is so public we have much of it in one Wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

Then there's the espionage documents talking all the cases where foreign countries were spying on us. Then there's the Snowden files showing that basically every European country was partnered with NSA spying on who knows who (probably Europeans) with exceptions being Iceland, Switzerland, and maybe one other country (don't recall).

A teacher of mine used to say that people often point a finger at others but are pointing at least three back at themselves as they do so. Europeans are doing it with both hands.

[eeZah7Ux]

> misconception they have that their own spy agencies aren't doing the same thing to everyone else

Never heard anybody claiming that.

> demonstrably benefit from and invite NSA spying

Citation needed.

> we conduct foreign surveillance is to avoid large scale armed conflict

Building the most powerful surveillance system is no different than creating the largest army. It escalates conflict worldwide.

[scotty79]

Why spying your own citizens is bad then? What magical qualities person obtains through us citizenship that makes him/her harmless to usa?

If you justify spying by scary things you need to show why people you agree not to spy are not scary.

[tptacek]

Because there is no probability that we are going to end up in large scale armed conflict with our own citizens. Ask a simple question, get a simple answer.

[scotty79]

Why? What if some of them are spying for foreign power or prepare sabotage or are paid up by foreign powers to incite political unrest or, God forbid, political change that might end up in unilateral nuclear disarmament that might end up with destruction of usa with nuclear weapons?

The fact is you can imagine scary enough scenario to justify one thing but can't imagine other scenario to justify another. Thing is ultimately you need to act on some principle and current principle in USA is, us citizens have right to privacy, other people have no right to privacy.

This is silly rule because it creates places like current NSA. If it wasn't ok to spy on foreign citizens there'd be no NSA and if it was ok to spy everybody then NSA would have way more oversight.

[tptacek]

If they are spying for foreign powers, they can in fact be surveilled.

[scotty79]

Only if NSA knows if they are. But what if they don't know yet? Don't you want them to know rather sooner than later? You could easily achieve that by spying on your citizens rather than on the rest of the humanity your citizens might be spying for.

[tptacek]

The premise of the preceding question is that the US somehow goes easy on its own citizens when they do things that might justify electronic surveillance. But that's obviously not true; there's just a different process for it.